"Its difficult being openly gay here. It’s the people who are yelling fag and dyke in the parking lots that makes you genuinely fear for your personal safety and emotional well being," said Meredith Wells, a member of the Rensselaer Pride Alliance.

On April 13, RPI sophomore Eric Williams was the subject of verbal harassment while walking in downtown Troy at night, he said. The man harassing Williams followed him by car as he left Gino’s Pizzeria with two other friends.

Late in the fall semester two openly gay students said they had bottles thrown at them as they danced during a RPI fraternity party. "One of the bottles hit me," said Brian Barnett, one of the students. "When we looked around they pretended nothing was going on. But as we left they lashed out at us." The two students weren’t able to identify those who threw the bottles.

Although they chose to speak to Public Safety about the incident, they later decided not to file, partly due to fear of reprisal, they said.

Unfortunately, it is exactly this type of response that makes correcting the problem difficult, according to Mark Del Vecchio, assistant director of the Department of Public Safety. "It makes all the more frustrating, when we start looking into incidents, that students refuse to file a formal compliant."

He went onto explain that if there is no official report, no action can be taken to pursue and correct the situation and prevent it from happening in the future.

Dean of Students Mark Smith expressed a desire to correct these situations. "When we become aware of a situation we investigate it and we are very sympathetic to the students involved especially in the case of harassment," he said.

Concerns for the gay community were raised at the recent Student Life Forum held on April 18. Vice President for Student Life Eddie Knowles addressed those concerns as well as the possibility of creating a position within DOSO which would deal specifically with the needs of gay students on campus.

Knowles commented that he had intended to create such a position several years ago, but the gay community at the time said that wasn’t what they wanted.

"Nothing has been done that has a title to it," Knowles said. However, he said that there is support for students with these types of concerns.

"There are experienced professionals in this community, some of whom are gay themselves, who will support them and assist them in being part of the Rensselaer experience," he said.

The problem, he said, was the turnover of the student body since the time when this network was widely used. "There was not a good transfer of information and history to the new students coming in so that they would know who to go to within Student Life."

Numbers from the Senior Survey indicate that much of the gender and race based harassment is on the student-to-student level rather than the staff, faculty, or administrator-to-student levels. There seems to be the same type of trend at work with sexual-orientation harassment and discrimination. According to Christine Nadeau, Assistant Director of Residence Life, one of the greatest sources of harassment in on campus residences are the white boards found on dorm room doors.

"[Harassment via white boards is] routine for this group," Wells agreed. "After it keeps happening, and you have to keep erasing off your white board—I know this is a terrible thing—but you get used to it."

Wells said the situation is especially difficult for freshmen who have little choice in where or with whom they live. In order to insulate themselves from this type of harassment, those gay students who choose to live on campus tend to live in clustered housing.

Director of Residence Life Peter Snyder said that these concerns would be addressed through new programs during student orientation and as part of the first-year experience programs.